Attributes for Characterizing the Evolution of Architectural Design Decisions

Abstract

Software architecture has been widely used to describe the design of a software system. Its maintenance over time can be costly, especially when maintainers have to recover software architecture knowledge due to poor design documentation. Capturing design decisions is one important aspect in documenting design and even though there has been some work in this area, there has been little emphasis on the evolution of design decisions. In this paper, we analyze design decision models and the issues of not capturing evolving decisions. To tackle these issues, we propose a set of decision attributes that can be used to support evolving decision models.

Knowledge representation of the software architecture design process based on situation calculus

“…The approach discussed in Capilla et al . () is similar, but instead of providing a complete list of attributes to describe a design decision, they propose the use of mandatory and optional attributes that can be tailored according to different needs for making more agile the efforts of capturing a design decision. In addition, they include specific attributes and relationships aimed to support the evolution of design decisions.…”

Evaluating Architectural Design Decision Paradigms in Global Software Development

“…A detailed comparison of these existing models and tools has been done in [22]. However, the existing models are hard to support architecture evolution very well [4].…”

An approach to documenting and evolving architectural design decisions

“…We can see that most of the existing methods document ADDs with different emphases, and moreover, they seldom support architecture evolution and knowledge evolution very well in practice [6]. Our work is that ADDs can be explicitly documented by a scenario-based approach, which covers three views of an architecture that form the basis of our work, to record architectural knowledge and to manage decision evolution for reducing knowledge evaporation, thereby addressing both the documentation and the evolution needs for ADDs.…”

“…In the research related to our work, the focus has been on the development of models and tools to capture, represent, and share ADDs [5], [17], [27]. However, most of the existing methods document ADDs with different emphases, and moreover, they seldom support architecture evolution and knowledge evolution very well in practice [6], which is also critical for architectural knowledge management and needs more attention in research and industry [20].…”